Jeffrey Goldberg’s map of what the boundaries of Middle Eastern countries might be a generation from now (“After Iraq,” January/February Atlantic) is objectionable for two reasons. First, the map is based on one drawn by Ralph Peters and published in the Armed Forces Journal in 2006, which Goldberg admits fed the paranoia of many Middle Easterners who saw it as a blueprint for an American plan to redraw the region’s borders. Its publication in The Atlantic is likely to evoke a similar response, confirming the suspicions of those already suspicious.

There might still be an argument for such an exercise, if the discussion surrounding the map were a serious attempt to consider alternative developments in the region. But neither Peters nor Goldberg claims that the effort is serious. Instead, they regard it as an act of “knowing whimsy.” Unfortunately, it is hardly “knowing.” What they seem to know is that there are many ethnic groups in the region that might wish to become independent of the states that now control them. So they give them new states.

Both authors’ basic misunderstanding is their thesis that the borders of Middle Eastern countries have little or no reality, having been created by European powers for their own reasons. In fact, Egypt and Iran are historical entities going back thousands of years within approximately their present boundaries. Afghanistan goes back centuries, as does Ethiopia (both of which are included in the author’s Middle East). Turkey has carved out an existence that is unlikely to be challenged either by its own people or by its neighbors. Distinctions such as these must be the starting point of any discussion of the region’s future.

Raymond D. Gastil Deep River, Conn.

One can learn more about Jeffrey Goldberg’s political opinions from the borders that he leaves alone than from the ones he changes in his map of the “new Middle East.” While Goldberg drags his imperialist crayons across the region, tearing down borders both old and new, he tellingly makes no changes to either Israel or Kuwait. Since he draws so many other borders along ethnic and religious lines, why is Kuwait not made part of Shiite Iraq, and why does Israel maintain control over the Galilee and Negev, two areas with Arab majorities?

Could it be that Goldberg doesn’t want to address the difficult questions that changing these particular borders would present? Redrawing Kuwait out of existence would be tantamount to admitting that the country has no history of nationhood and would remove the rationale for the Gulf War of 1991. Shrinking Israel would bring up the uncomfortable fact that the country rules many Arab citizens against their will. But these are the sorts of messy realities that one must confront when playing 21st-century colonialist map games.

Mark Kawar Washington, D.C.

Jeffrey Goldberg replies:

Unlike Raymond Gastil, I do not believe that it is “objectionable” for a free press to pose questions about the future of the Middle East. I tend to think that Americans should be allowed to think and write freely, even about the Middle East, and even if our thinking and writing makes Middle Easterners “suspicious.” Gastil confirms the argument that many countries in northeast Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia are particularly artificial by naming five that aren’t.

Mark Kawar suggests that I drew the map with “imperialist crayons.” The redrawn map reflects the well-known desires of the Kurds, the Palestinians, the Baluchis, and the Africans of south Sudan for national liberation, rather than continued subjugation. Exactly how, then, is this imagined map a reflection of “imperialist” thinking?

David Simon’s Baltimore

As an avid fan of The Wire, I was disappointed by Mark Bowden’s recent article (“The Angriest Man in Television,” January/February Atlantic) on the show’s creator, David Simon. Bowden argues that Simon’s bitterness and anger have led him to color his fictional Baltimore with “suffering, stupidity, venality, and vice” at the expense of “selflessness, courage, and decency.” In support of his argument, Bowden quotes the Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson, who writes, “What [The Wire has] left out are the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, church­going, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism.”

Yet the genius of The Wire is precisely that it rejects such facile distinctions between good guys and bad guys, cops and robbers, churchgoers and drug users. Rather than suffering from a dearth of “decent people,” the show finds such people in all walks of Baltimore life.

Near the end of his piece, Bowden admits that the fifth season of The Wire has targeted for derision two friends of his, William Marimow and John Carroll, who worked with David Simon at TheBaltimore Sun. Ultimately, Bowden’s insistence on the skewed bleakness of Simon’s vision smacks more of an attempt to cushion his friends against caricature than it does of a genuine effort to capture the complexities that make The Wire such compelling television.

Peter Welch Newton, Mass.

Education Solutions

Matt Miller is right that “localist” arrangements in education deliver maximum power to teachers’ unions (“First, Kill All the School Boards,” January/February Atlantic), which can draw on national resources and political connections, stultifying attempts at real improvement. But in a national system, the fashionable, counterevidential theo­ries of the technocratic elite remain beyond correction since, being national, they have been removed from competition.

So try this instead: central funding for schools, but using a voucher system. Take the total national schools budget and divide it by the number of school-age children. Then adjust that figure by area, allowing for differential living costs across the U.S.—then pay out the vouchers to parents. They can be redeemed against education in any school that agrees to submit itself to annual government testing of basic literacy and numeracy standards, and nothing more.

Then let market forces do the rest. Anyone can try whatever trendy educational theory they like. But, after a bit, they won’t have many customers. Schools will shop for students (which will drive up discipline standards), and students will shop for schools (which will do the same for teaching standards).

Expect some opposition from the teaching unions, though. They’ll have plenty of good reasons for keeping their nonaccountability to markets intact.

M. T. Pearse Houghton, N.Y.

Matt Miller’s intentions are good and his ideas are coherent, but in the end, they will change very little on the ground. I teach in a border town in Texas, where roughly half of the 50,000 students currently enrolled in our independent school district will drop out. This is a staggering problem that will manifest itself in increased crime and general economic decline.

So what to do? Nationalize the education system, as Miller would have it? Anyone who teaches in a public-school classroom knows the answer: get outside of the system. Charter schools like KIPP, Uncommon Schools, Achievement First, and IDEA are proving that results don’t come from legislation. None of these schools has an issue with standardized tests, because they teach with far more rigor than the tests require—and they have a better idea about what should be taught than the “experts” in Washington, D.C. The things that make a difference are rarely mentioned in reports or legislation: zero-tolerance discipline systems; longer school days, weeks, and years; more homework; facilities that are separate from chaotic public schools; the ability to remove disruptive students; and, most important, teachers who are willing to do whatever it takes and be underpaid and overworked.

Instead of attempting to implement wholesale change in Washington, we should strengthen the existing charter framework that allows educators to bypass the local, state, and national bureaucracies and get back into the classroom with the tools and freedom they need.

J. Goldstein Brownsville, Texas

Reading Matt Miller’s article, I was surprised to learn that Horace Mann, on his 1843 “educational fact-finding” tour through Europe, found the town of Leipzig in Prussia. It is actually located in Saxony, and even in our days, any citizen of Leipzig would get rather angry at the suggestion that she or he was a Prussian.

Ludwig Uhlig Athens, Ga.

Matt Miller replies:

Ludwig Uhlig is correct. Leipzig was part of Saxony at the time. Mann also visited schools in Berlin and elsewhere in Prussia proper. I regret the error.

Post-Colonial Studies

The makeover of imperialism continues. Paul Kennedy writes (“The Imperial Mind,” January/February Atlantic) that it’s “silly either to denounce or to rejoice in [the British empire’s] existence,” and that young Britons maintained the ramparts that held together the “thin crust of civilization.” How uplifting that idea must be, and how convenient. And how incorrect. I cannot speak for other regions that Britain colonized, but I can provide some perspective from India. Between the beginning and end of colonization, India went from generating about a quarter of the gross world product to about 2 percent of it. Before colonization, India faced one famine perhaps every 75 years. During colonization, famine occurred every three to four years, causing deaths numbering in the dozens of millions. Since independence, there hasn’t been a single famine, despite a threefold increase in population. Close to the end of empire, literacy levels were in single digits, and life expectancy was less than 30 years. What were the empire’s achievements? A massive transfer of wealth, a rapacious surplus-recovery system, the destruction of subsistence practices, the strangulation of industry, the obliteration of inland trade, and the denigration of a deep and complex cultural system.

My claim is not that India was perfect, but that it was a vibrant and evolving civilization—no thinner of crust than the European model—and that empire denuded and degraded it. To claim otherwise may soothe Caucasian guilt, but the argument that imperialism was needed to “preserve order in a fatefully flawed world” is as old as it is discredited.

Sanjoy Chakravorty Philadelphia, Pa.

Paul Kennedy replies:

I’m not sure that Sanjoy Chakravorty knows how to read a text properly. I was not saying that empire-building was necessary to preserve order in a flawed world; I was summarizing Alan Sandison’s conclusions about the basic views of Buchan, Kipling, Conrad, and Haggard. And I think Sandison was correct: the imperialist intellectuals were worried people, and rightly so. Their time was passing.

I also wonder about the tart reference to “Caucasian guilt,” at least if it is personally meant. My four grandparents’ lines are all Irish, and if any land took a battering from English expansionism, it was Ireland. But go back a few centuries, and you will see that those English took a battering from the Romans, the Danes, the Norsemen, and the Normans.

So I return to the final paragraph of my original piece: it is silly to have total approbation, or total denunciation, of some large imperial enterprise of past centuries. There were undoubtedly empires of plunder, bloodshed, disruption—some (the Nazis) entirely so. But it is ridiculous to argue that rule by a distant power (Roman, Spanish, British) left nothing positive behind.

The conclusive proof is, as always, in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and the wonderful scene—just try YouTube—called “What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?” Use your imagination to transfer it to the case of Britain and India … Cricket, anyone?

Aid For Afghanistan

Sarah Chayes’s “Scents and Sensibility” (December Atlantic) is an encouraging profile of ingenuity and commitment in Afghanistan’s south. As a critique of U.S.-funded programs, however, it is narrowly focused, citing only two such initiatives as examples, and these in forbidding Kandahar and Helmand, home to the bulk of the insurgency. One can point to dozens of successful—even lauded—USAID-backed efforts, such as the Construction Trades Training Center in Jalalabad, which trains Afghans in quality workmanship and sustains itself through materials-testing fees. Chayes’s efforts are remarkable, but her article could have been stronger and more insightful had it presented a sample of similar initiatives and formulated reasons for their success or failure. Given the breadth of U.S. assistance around the world, it isn’t difficult to find shortcomings, or examples of naive, wastrel Americans; more elusive are the formulas for success.

Jason Anderson Washington, D.C.

Sarah Chayes replies:

I did not set out to write a comprehensive critique of USAID activities in Afghanistan. That would have been a different article. However, the numerous responses I have received from implementing partners in other parts of Afghanistan, as well as from former and current USAID personnel, thanking me for shedding light on the kind of frustrations they have experienced, indicate that my company’s case is hardly an isolated one.

Editors’ Note:

An item in the January/February Calendar incorrectly stated the number of times Sean Bell was shot. The police fired 50 shots at Bell, but an autopsy revealed that he was struck four times. We regret the error.

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

The new version of Apple’s signature media software is a mess. What are people with large MP3 libraries to do?

When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title.

Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced. Which makes sense: Like the web itself, his schema was shipped, good enough,and an improvement on the vacuum which preceded it. Those three big tags, as they’re called, work well with pop and rock written between 1960 and 1995. This didn’t prevent rampant mislabeling in the early days of the web, though, as anyone who remembers Napster can tell you. His system stumbles even more, though, when it needs to capture hip hop’s tradition of guest MCs or jazz’s vibrant culture of studio musicianship.

Jim Gilmore joins the race, and the Republican field jockeys for spots in the August 6 debate in Cleveland.

After decades as the butt of countless jokes, it’s Cleveland’s turn to laugh: Seldom have so many powerful people been so desperate to get to the Forest City. There’s one week until the Republican Party’s first primary debate of the cycle on August 6, and now there’s a mad dash to get into the top 10 and qualify for the main event.

With former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore filing papers to run for president on July 29, there are now 17 “major” candidates vying for the GOP nomination, though that’s an awfully imprecise descriptor. It takes in candidates with lengthy experience and a good chance at the White House, like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush; at least one person who is polling well but is manifestly unserious, namely Donald Trump; and people with long experience but no chance at the White House, like Gilmore. Yet it also excludes other people with long experience but no chance at the White House, such as former IRS Commissioner Mark Everson.